Mike Nock - Hearing

2023 release

Mike Nock is an icon of the Australian and international jazz scenes. In a career spanning more than 65 years, including 25 years in the US, he has worked with the world’s top jazz artists and garnered a swag of awards, including being inducted into the Australian Jazz Hall of Fame. His discography of more than 35 albums, recorded with his Trio, Quartet, Big Small Band and many other collaborators, includes ARIA, AIR and Jazz Bell awards, but this is his first solo album since the chart-topping ‘Touch’, released 30 years ago almost to the day, in 1993. Its 13 tracks reveal the many colours and moods that can be conjured from keys of a piano, and prove again Mike Nock’s incomparable genius as both composer and performer.

Tracks:
01 Prologue
02 Sunrise
03 Conundrum
04 Vale John
05 Re-Affirmation
06 And in the Night Comes Rain (Jonathan Zwartz)
07 Jacanori
08 Accessing the Flow
09 Spirit Song (Bernie McGann)
10 Square Circles
11 Waltz for My Lonely Years
12 Journey Through an Imaginary Landscape
13 Windows of Arquez (Bryce Rohde)

Total disc: 50’37
All compositions by Mike Nock, except where indicated.  ‘Vale John’ written for John Pochee.

"One of jazzdom's most expansive minds." - Chuck Berg in Jazztimes (US)

"Mike Nock is a marvellous pianist." - San Francisco Examiner

"His playing was sublime. A supreme sense of rhythmic invention" - The Press, Christchurch (NZ)

"One of the world's key jazz pianists for the past 45 years." - John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald

Winner of ARIA, AIR and Bell Awards for his previous releases, Mike Nock was inducted into the Australian Jazz Hall of Fame in 2009.

SMH Review:

No one does wistfulness better than Mike Nock. Although perfectly capable of evoking infinite moods and feelings at the piano, he does wistfulness with distinctive unsentimentality. It’s the kind of sadness that might be expressed with a half a wry smile, and is always couched in beauty because Nock, above all, is an aesthete who has ever greater command over his art.

Now 82, he has honed his instincts for eliminating the extraneous – not that he has ever been an excessively garrulous improviser. In 1981, when he made the great Ondas LP for ECM, he sustained the oneiric sound-world he created across the album’s length without the music ever being tainted by monotony. He did it again 30 years ago, when he released his last solo album, Touch, which, like this one, was recorded in Eugene Goossens Hall.

An improvised Prologue sets the scene with its sparse, subtle drama and sprinkle of surprises. Sunrises, which Nock recorded on his first solo album in 1978, follows with impeccable programming logic. It’s a reassuring piece that makes you settle more comfortably in your chair for the aural journey now begun.

The pattern of a short improvisation leading to a longer piece is repeated by the mood-breaking sprightliness of Conundrum preceding Vale John, a tribute to John Pochee. Some listeners may find such little diversions tangential, as if coming from a different storybook, but this one could be seen as a prelude evoking the ever-ready wit of Pochee, an eminent Sydney drummer and band-leader who died last year. Vale John is a heartfelt lament drawing on decades of friendship, with the Steinway sounding magnificent as notes are left hanging in the air.

The etude-like Re-Affirmation then beckons the first non-Nock composition: Jonathan Zwartz’s delicate And in the Night Comes Rain, a sonic picture that draws out Nock’s exquisite touch and use of the sustain pedal, so the piano almost sounds like a string section. It develops a soulful left-hand ostinato, against which Nock takes flight with typical lyricism.

The playful side of his improvising comes out in a fragment called Jacanori, before Accessing the Flow reconnects us to the album’s through line, and leads to the second non-Nock composition in Bernie McGann’s Spirit Song, now part of the folklore of Australian jazz. Nock offers a more pensive reading than the chirping blitheness with which McGann used to perform it, and the piece not only accommodates this but seems made to measure.

After a little circuit-breaking from Square Circles, Nock leads us into the three compositions that form the album’s final chapter: the elegiac Waltz for My Lonely Years, followed by the impressionism and drama of Journey through an Imaginary Landscape and then Windows of Arquez. Fans of Jim McLeod’s Jazztrack on ABC Classic FM will recognise this lush Bryce Rohde composition as the show’s theme music, and Nock sustains all its inherent mystery.

John Shand  2/8/23